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Here! Now! In the moment! Paddling in the middle of a fast moving stream of news and information. Here & Now is a daily news magazine, bringing you the news that breaks after "Morning Edition" and before "All Things Considered."

Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale and Democratic state Rep. Mike Schlossberg of Lehigh County are calling for increased resources for mental health services. The two fielded questions during a Facebook town hall Tuesday.

After mass shootings, lawmakers often call for increasing mental health services, Schlossberg said. However, those calls are quickly forgotten — and in Pennsylvania, the mainstream of mental health funding hasn’t increased in about 20 years.

“Let’s actually put the funding into these areas to actually do something about this problem, because until we do that, this is just us having a conversation about something that means nothing,” he said.

More than homicides, though, a conversation about gun deaths is a conversation about suicide risk, Schlossberg said.

“The biggest source of gun-related deaths in Pennsylvania is not homicide, it’s not accidental deaths, it’s suicide,” he said. “In 2017, we lost 1,970 people to suicide in Pennsylvania. More than half of those were the result of firearms deaths.”

DePasquale noted while funding increases can be a hard sell, communities are already paying for untreated mental health issues in other ways.